I think both of this and the above post are treating concepts as more platonic than they are in practice. Take for instance “one legged duck”, it has the same structure as “open faced sandwich” but most people would say it is in fact still a duck, even though ducks have two legs. I think language concepts are often pointing at fuzzy categories, and so it’s natural to not be sure how far they extend, to extend them in ways that stretch further than other people’s extensions, etc.
Some people’s boundary for river includes water, but some people’s doesn’t, etc. The dictionary definition is a good starting place, but rarely sufficient for how humans use language.
Take for instance “one legged duck”, it has the same structure as “open faced sandwich” but most people would say it is in fact still a duck, even though ducks have two legs.
Yes, of course. I didn’t say anything that would contradict that, even by implication. I certainly wouldn’t claim that all concepts which might be described with the same very general syntactic structure behave in the way I described; that would be a rather bizarre claim, wouldn’t it?
EDIT:
The dictionary definition is a good starting place, but rarely sufficient for how humans use language.
I made no reference to the dictionary definition of anything, though.
The point I was trying to make was that for instance in your open faced sandwich example, there are many people who would say it’s still obviously a sandwich, just like the duck is still a duck.
However, I realized I don’t know enough about the philosophy of language to meaningfully contribute to the discussion, so I’m going to bow out.
I think both of this and the above post are treating concepts as more platonic than they are in practice. Take for instance “one legged duck”, it has the same structure as “open faced sandwich” but most people would say it is in fact still a duck, even though ducks have two legs. I think language concepts are often pointing at fuzzy categories, and so it’s natural to not be sure how far they extend, to extend them in ways that stretch further than other people’s extensions, etc.
Some people’s boundary for river includes water, but some people’s doesn’t, etc. The dictionary definition is a good starting place, but rarely sufficient for how humans use language.
Yes, of course. I didn’t say anything that would contradict that, even by implication. I certainly wouldn’t claim that all concepts which might be described with the same very general syntactic structure behave in the way I described; that would be a rather bizarre claim, wouldn’t it?
EDIT:
I made no reference to the dictionary definition of anything, though.
The point I was trying to make was that for instance in your open faced sandwich example, there are many people who would say it’s still obviously a sandwich, just like the duck is still a duck.
However, I realized I don’t know enough about the philosophy of language to meaningfully contribute to the discussion, so I’m going to bow out.